Rob Rinder writes fiction! How his debut novel The Trial was inspired by real life...
Holly Newson: Rob, thank you so much for joining me to talk about your debut novel – The Trial.
Rob Rinder: Thanks for having me.
HN: Can you start by introducing us to it?
RR: I love it in here. It’s such a nice place to introduce a book. It’s a whodunnit really, which is stuff that I read – some of the great tradition, he said modestly, of Agatha Christie. But the pulsing centre of it is the life of Adam Green, who is a student barrister or pupil – that’s the name of what a student barrister is. We, through his eyes, go unpick what happens in a murder trial. He’s appointed to the highest-profile murder case of the year. It’s not a spoiler to say that a hero cop dies in the Old Bailey of Botox poisoning. And so far, lots of colleagues, including High Court judges and senior barristers, haven’t got it. They tell me “I never got the end!”, so that’s good.
HN: How much is Adam based on your experience of pupillage and your experience of how you felt as a barrister in general?
RR: Both of those things. A significant part of Adam is based on me. He’s an outsider. Often, we come to people with our self-evident subconscious biases, in short describing it as being ‘branded on the thumb’. And it’s so true in Britain. You come to certain assumptions based on how someone sounds and, in my case, people think – I use this expression ‘mugged by a Mitford – that I must be terribly posh. But this is my own special creation – posh veneer. But actually, I grew up in a very working-class community, very proudly. Ended up going to university and becoming a barrister. Always, and still do to an extent, feel sort of like an outsider, no matter how serious my work got. People would ask me significant questions about what I thought they should do. I’d always be looking around for a grownup, or someone serious, or someone posh. So, it’s that journey, as well, of Adam being an outsider who arrives in this rarefied world. Being a bit maladroit and working out how to socially function. There are things people don’t realise – you arrive as a pupil; you’ll be doing your pupil master’s work and that’s what it’s still called. It feels profoundly archaic, almost Victorian or quasi-Harry Potter.
HN: To go from a very likeable character to a not-likeable one – Jonathan. Tell me about Jonathan, the inspiration and how he came to life.
RR: I’ll be really careful about this one. So, he’s a series of threads that have woven themselves into a tapestry of a lot of people’s pupil masters from around that time. Back then, it was really the wild west. What that meant was there was very limited training for being a pupil master or missus. You could just be one. You were appointed, and that was that. One of my mentorees, her first few days in chambers she was cataloguing evidence in a serial killer case. That was her job and some of that evidence is breathtakingly violent. Imagine that, that’s your first day. No preparation, then onto the next thing. And yes, it’s important to build a degree of resilience, but at the same time, doing that for 12 hours a day is not okay. So, they’re being more mindful of dragging this into the 21st century, which I think is important.
I don’t just exist in his character; I exist in other people’s as well.
HN: Do you remember your first court case and how that felt?
RR: Nobody’s asked me that question. Thank you for asking. It was on the second floor of Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. So, in your first six – it’s called your first six, you aren’t on your feet – you’re doing the work of other people in chambers; you’re following your pupil master. My pupil master was a real character of the old school. ‘Cancelled’ is what you’d call it now, I think probably. My second six, where you’re doing your own cases, it was second floor Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, which is now a block of flats. I was representing Mr Cojocaru, I wonder where he is now. He’ll probably be quite an old man now. I was mitigating for a series of thefts, I think. I started speaking and my mouth went so dry. But it was exhausting – 100-hour weeks. Doing everybody else’s work in chambers at the same time as doing your own.
HN: You obviously went from being a barrister to being on TV, so how was that transition?
RR: Being on television happened really randomly for me. To be clear, I didn’t apply for it. It was a series of ultra-random events. I was doing a case in Croydon, doing some international law as well, got bored, wrote a script. The woman said it was the worst thing she’d ever read; she happened to be the head of daytime television. The next thing I knew, having met this person in Manchester, they were putting this thing on television as arbitration court. And because they were on television, my instinct was that these people all talk bullocks. But at the heart of that show, was law that I really care about. And that’s I suspect why – I’m confident why – I didn’t get eviscerated by colleagues, because although you only see 10 minutes of a case that might have lasted for 1.5 hours, even in the smaller cases, which on the face of them look a bit silly or frivolous, there might be a really challenging legal issue at stake – what forms a contract, how and why all of us end up in toxic disputes with one another. So, in many ways for me, and I hope for other people that watch, but certainly for me, it’s been a real gift.
But at the heart of that show, was law that I really care about.
HN: There’s the prologue to the book, and straight away I thought, I have questions. So, has Susanna Reid read her mention and what did she think?
RR: (laughs) She actually messaged me. I wrote that prologue, not long after coming off presenting ‘Good Morning Britain’ for the first time, and I do it once or twice a month alongside her. She’s sort of a mate. And I do look alongside her with bewildered awe.
Funnily enough, it reminds me of when I was a young barrister. I had a lot of success through luck quite quickly, and I’d be able to choose the QC who would be first chair. I couldn’t do a murder trial on my own, it’s self-policed in that way, it’s not like in America. It’s really important that you have the expertise before you take serious cases. So, I’d be able to choose the QC, as they were then called, who would be doing the case as my leader. And I would always choose, if I could, the best female silks because they were brilliant. Often because, in this one case – and I don’t think she’ll mind me saying, I don’t care if she does – Sally Bennett-Jenkins QC who has 6 children – triplets, twins and one, and a dog – and a husband (I mean that is sort of the same thing. He was also a silk). She used to lead me in various cases. She was doing a closing speech in a murder trial we were doing with each other, and this does relate to Susanna Reid I promise, and at the end, the clerk of the Court came up to me and said “Mr Rinder, it was so nice the way you were looking at Ms. Bennett-Jenkins during her closing speech. It reminded me of the way Nancy Reagan used to look at Ronald Reagan”. And bear in mind, our client had been quite substantially guilty of several murders. When she was doing her closing submissions to the jury, apparently, I had no memory of this, I was looking at her going like *looks in wonder*, almost like “Isn’t she amazing?”. And our client’s guilty, but wow. So that’s why I put Susanna Reid in.
HN: You’ve made D.I. (Detective Inspector) Cliveden fancy her as well.
RR: Yeah, because I see it on Twitter! And she’s so good-natured about it and the thing is, she’s so beautifully private. I think there are certain cops, if I ever work alongside police officers now in various documentaries I make, again I suspect the impulse to put that in wasn’t just sort of a little note to a friend. It was also that sometimes they go “Oh, your mate Susanna, how is she doing?”. Which, you know, better to be loved, right?
HN: There’s also, in the prologue, a bit where you note that D.I. Cliveden has turned down TV work in favour of policing. Was that kind of an anti-nod to yourself?
RR: To a degree, to a degree. A little self-deprecation, but there’s a lot of that throughout the book. I don’t just exist in his character; I exist in other people’s as well.
HN: I was going to ask you about Adam’s mum, who is a matchmaker mum if there ever was one, what was she inspired by?
RR: She is inspired by some of the women who I love and grew up with, who have this limitless capacity for being desperately proud at the same time of not really understanding the world that their kids may have ended up in. And that’s a real challenge for all sorts of families, especially with class dynamics, if you’ve grown up in a community where people are one thing. You’re gifted all of this passion, all of the things my mum gifted me. All of a sudden, they’ve grabbed their own pen and are writing their own story outside of the normal narrative that you understand. That can be really terrifying.
Why Audible matters is because a sentence or a perfect character created and conjured out of the soul and mind of a writer is the most articulate and poetic moment of knowing you’re not alone.
HN: And have you heard any of the audiobook narration, or Josh Dylan’s voice, who narrates it?
RR: Yeah, a little bit. What I really love is just the number of people, when this first came out, their first response was ‘Where’s the audiobook?’. And I think that’s really exciting. I don’t care how you read. Why Audible matters is because a sentence or a perfect character created and conjured out of the soul and mind of a writer is the most articulate and poetic moment of knowing you’re not alone. And whether or not that’s because you’ve read it – lots of people find that very challenging with so much noise in the world – or you’ve heard an actor read out that sentence, it doesn’t make any difference.
HN: And on that beautiful note, I’m going to say thank you so much. The Trial is a very – I don’t know if joyous is the right word to describe something when there’s a murder – but it is a joyous read and listen.
RR: Look, the murder weapon is Botox because it does elevate it to that where it is funny. But it is genuinely about, and I hope people really get this, the life of chambers. You know the life of the Old Bailey that you don’t get to see otherwise. There’s also this other subplot, one or two of them. One is about what motivates people to be interested in standing between an individual and the State as a barrister. And we get that in the story of Adam Green to a degree. But there’s also another story in there – the Cavanagh case, which I hope you picked up on – which is what happens when somebody’s treated differently because they’ve got lots of money. And what happens when barristers discover, let’s say, that somebody may or may not be guilty, what do they do in that moral moment? So, you have this whodunnit and, I hope, layered below or sitting on the foundations, let’s say, is another discussion about justice and about this entire universe that you may not be aware of. So – The Trial. I’m selling it. Did I sell it well? I don’t know. And listen to the audiobook, but do not operate heavy machinery. Do we say that? When should you listen to an audiobook?
HN: Whenever you want, when you’re sat on the sofa stroking your cat, when you’re cooking your dinner.
RR: What if you don’t have a cat?
HN: Oh, you’re in trouble (laughs). Anytime! When you’re going for a walk...
RR: Walking is good.
HN: Yes, walking is perfect.
RR: Is that when you listen to yours?
HN: I listen to lots when I’m walking.
RR: Well *picks up book*, Rob Rinder is here, but listen to it on the audiobook *throws his book*.
Uncover Rob Rinder’s impossible murder mystery in The Trial.
